Alchemy

“I lived in East Africa for 14 years working with HIV care and control. HIV Medication adherence outcomes are better in Africa than they are in the United States, and that's always baffled me from a public health perspective. What are the barriers to access to medications and adherence that are driving such different?

- Peter Park

Alchemy builds and operates in-house pharmacies for safety net providers. And then they go deeper. They enable safety net clinics to rapidly deploy and manage a best-in-class pharmacy for their populations, and extends impact beyond the four walls of the health center through patient-centered technology and clinical pharmacy interventions.

Co-founders Peter Park and Susie Crowe have spent the better part of their careers on health access for vulnerable populations, from communities in Appalachia to Kenya, and complex conditions for patients relying on LTSS waivers to patient assistance programs to access life-saving medications.

Our guest investor in this episode is Elana Berkowitz, is a Managing Partner at Springbank where she invests in infrastructure serving the long-overlooked needs of women and working families.

We discuss:

• Gross margins for a tech-enabled services business vs. software company

• The risks of building a business dependent on a federal program (340B Drug Pricing Program)

• Being in the “do things that don’t scale” phase

Meet the Founder

Peter is a mission-oriented healthcare entrepreneur who has spent his entire career focused on advancing health and social equity opportunities. He was part of the early team at AMPATH, the largest US government funded global HIV program in the world, where he co-led social determinants-related programming, a capitated primary care insurance product and cardiac tertiary care services in western Kenya. He founded two venture-backed digital health and virtual primary care startups in Kenya (ConnectHealth and Antara Health), and led the New Ventures team at Truepill as group GM prior to founding Alchemy.

Peter holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and BA from Middlebury College, and is a Y Combinator Fellow. 

Meet the VC

Elana Berkowitz is a founding partner of Springbank Collective which invests in early stage companies building the infrastructure to enable working women and families to thrive across career, care and household consumers. Investments include Plume, Wellthy, Catch, Chief and Little Otter. She also advises Eric Schmidt's family office.

A serial social entrepreneur and policy wonk, she's a former Obama Administration technology policy official across the Obama-Biden Transition Team, the FCC and Secretary Clinton's office at the State Department. She also served as innovator-in-residence for CARE, one of the world's largest humanitarian organizations where she launched a refugee filmmaking program with Adobe and co-founded a startup that built the first ever voter registration chatbot which has since been acquired. She's done strategy, user insights and impact partnerships consulting for companies and organizations including Etsy, Kickstarter, Google and Code for America. She also worked at McKinsey as a technology, media, and telecom consultant across 10 countries.

She's on the steering committee for Power the Polls, which registered 700,000+ young Americans to serve as poll workers in 2020.